Tag Archives: OpenQuest

OpenQuest 2 Mega Gaming Fun edition :)

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Its spring bank holiday this weekend here in the UK, and the long weekend affords me time to sit in my Ivory Tower of Doom and finally nail what I’m including in OpenQuest 2.

Over the last week or so I’ve been working on Battle Magic. I’ve already got 50 or so new spells + another batch from Nathan Baron ( author of the upcoming Empires Rising ) + spells from the Legend SRD which aren’t already in OQ.  That’s before I even start looking at ‘classic’ RQ sources for inspiration. My overall objective with the magic system is to make it less ‘whiffy’ and more fun. My players have picked up on the fact that there’s spells in there like Fanaticism that don’t do a great deal, and are in fact superseded by their Divine/Sorcery counterparts (Berserk in this example).  This isn’t new to OQ, in the previous example the players said “magic has always been a bit crap in RQ”.  In OQ1 I did a partial job of ‘fixing’ the magic system, but I was sensitive that I wanted backwards compatibility. This time round I’m less concerned.   Sorcery and Divine are getting similar overhauls and extra spells.

As well as finally making my mind up on the contents/scope of OQ2, which I’ll post here when I’m done, I’ll also be considering whether or not I do a IndieGoGo preorder. Would that be something folks would be into?

Harken ye to Witchport!!

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Brian Isikoff has announced his OpenQuest supplement “Whispers from Witchport, Vol I: The Bleak Coast” coming this December.

From his website Witchport Whispers

What is the Bleak Coast setting?

The Bleak Coast is my setting for vaguely West Coast Lovecraftian, swords & sorcery toned fantasy adventures. I’ve been using it, roughly, for the past few years as background for various games, including Labyrinth Lord with Realms of Crawling Chaos, Swords & Wizardry, Crypts & Things, and OpenQuest. I enjoy using it, wanted to develop it and thought others might enjoy it as well. Mythos’ inspired, S&S noir-ish fantasy … what’s not to like (unless, I guess, you’re not a fan of any of those ;) )

It’s meant to be a flavorful region that can host a GM’s campaign as the main sandbox, drop into a larger campaign, or simply be kit bashed for use as a GM needs. I envision the setting as half-baked – it has more flavor and suggestion, and every GM and playgroup should develop and finish it as they like and need.

What is Witchport?

Witchport is one of the three major cities – or townships – in the Bleak Coast region. It’s a particular favorite of this author and GM. Witchport is the dirty fingered city of the three – it’s my Sanctuary, Lankhmar, Kingsport and Vornheim, all rolled into one.

What Bleak Coast products are on the Release Schedule?

The first planned release – currently in development – is “Whispers from Witchport, Vol I: The Bleak Coast“. This book will provide the setting basics and resources including gazetteer, factions, original cults, bestiary, npcs and more. Whispers from Witchport is being developed to support the OpenQuest system. The current release date is December 2012.

Stay tuned for future updates, and thanks for reading!

~ Brian

2012 D101 and the old skool

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OK here’s that beginning of year statement that frankly I should have put out at the beginning of the year…but hey this is the man who is doing the not so synchronized 12 Days of the UK OSR (which I’ve not forgotten about) 😉

So here’s how D101 stands with the Old School Renaissance (which ever form you are following);

Pretty fuckin’ Tall

OpenQuest is still my biggest seller, despite being something you can download for free, and Crypts and Things completely blew me out of the water when I ran the pre-order. From recent discussions where various folk have basically poked me repeatedly about the General Release date, I kinda get the feeling I’m sitting on a volcano here. Nice feeling that 🙂

In fact the Old school stuff is definitely half my income, the other half being Glorantha + my more indie games ( Monkey + Wordplay ). Part of me thinks it would be fun to go OSR all the way, but practicality + the fact I still like my Glorantha and story telling games so this ain’t going to happen. But saying that from coming in as a curious outsider, attracted because a couple of folk like Akrasia ( Akratic Wizardry ) and Shange Magnus ( Swords against the Outer Dark ) from the OSR blog sphere said nice things about OpenQuest, I’m now fully a champion of this style of play.

OpenQuest
OpenQuest 2nd Edition
This is going to be a 2nd edition in the same way that Chaosium does new editions for Call of Cthulhu. i.e. the underlying rules stay the same, with some clarifications and fixes, but with some additional content. So far we’ve made good progress towards achiving milestone number 1: Clean up, which is where I can put out a nice version in 8″ x 11″ ( which means hardcovers ) with tidied up rules and all the clip art replaced. Simon Bray has done a Stirling job on the art, touching up the existing art (his choice not mine) & illustrating the monsters that currently are presented by clip art. John Holmes is applying his laser eye to the rule book.

Milestone 2 “Additional Content” requires a bit more work. There’s going to be additional advice from me, because it became clear that I wrote a lot of OQ from the point of view that people would already be familiar with over 30 years of Game development history. The Otherworlds in the game are a good example. If you have been following Glorantha’s chequered history you’ll know exactly what I mean by Spirit World. If not you’ll need it explaining, which is what I aim to do. Other articles already lined up are “The Life Cycle of a Character” which explains the levels of play that an OpenQuest character goes through, so that players and Games Masters can create appropriately exciting adventures. There’s also some additional Optional rules by Simon Bray for “Relationships”. The big draw for additional content is a selection of new spells. I’ve got about 30 to add from the newly OGLed Legend, which will ensure compatibilty for GMS running adventures from that line and hopefully RQ6 to, + another 30+ of my own devising. Once we’ve reached Milestone 2 2nd Ed will be most accurately described as “OpenQuest Deluxe Edition” 🙂

Depending on the amount of work I generate aiming for a Summer release by the very latest 🙂

Here Be Dragons
Simon Bray’s and Paul Mitcheners weird and wonderful Swords and Sorcery island is currently in Editorial, so you’ll be getting a brand new Sandbox to play in. Release to coincide with OQ2 (so Summer/Autumn).

Crypts & Things
Main rule book
I’m fulfilling this as I type, so pre-orders should start landing in people’s post end of this or next week. General release very soon…watch this blog.

Blood of the Dragon and other adventures
The first module, is nearly finished writing wise, so that should be with pre-order people in March, with a general release a week after pre-orders have had theirs sent out. Look at ref number “UKS-01”, what could that mean? Well it means that its the start of a three module series set in “The Spires” (that’s where the S comes from ) 🙂 Next module “UKS-02 Fort Boneguard” is kinda my take on Keep of the Boarderlands with scads of undead. Finally things end with a bang with “UKS-03 Tower of the Hydra” a Sorcerer’s tower for you and your chums to take control of , or not if you don’t understand its twists and turns.

I’ve also got a couple of half-finished pieces, such as the 5th Level adventure I ran at Furnace 2010 here by known as “The Sky is Falling”, that will get written up at some point hopefully this year.

More stuff in the pipeline as well, but since its more nebulous I won’t mention it yet.

Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye

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One thing that gets my goat is that people say OpenQuest is an action orientated or cinematic game…

Its a common misconception that OpenQuest is focused on action.  I don’t understand why, just because OQ cuts out some of the crunch of its crunchier brothers doesn’t mean its Jet Li jumping about ignoring hits and doing back flips. Its still the regular “Don’t blunder into combat, plan your attack and pray you don’t get hit” of standard BRP. Remember HeroPoints are optional rule, and even if used you would have to give them out like flowing water and make Hit points based off Con+Siz rather than (Con+Siz/2) to acheive cinematic levels.

Crisis of multiple RuneQuests!

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“Arrrgh my leetle brain can not handle it” is what some of you will probably be thinking when you contemplate the number of RQ like systems that are available now or in the near future.

This time next year there will be at least :

Renaissance* (Black powder era flavoured RQ)
OpenQuest*
Aeon
BRP with the Magic supplement
Legend*
and of course

RuneQuest 6 itself.

(Systems marked * are OGL)

RQ 6 of course is the 400lb gorilla in the room. If you are a 3rd party publisher who is focusing on the sales you want to go that way. Lawrence & Pete are excellent authors, who I know are polishing and fine tuning the work they started with with MRQ2 into something that will be slick and awesome, that will have a solid schedule of support supplements which will have the same level of care and attention paid to them as the core rulebook. Pete n Loz’s legacy of MRQ2 and work they did on other systems during their short stint at Mongoose (Traveller – Judge Dredd and Strontium Dogs were ably pulled together by Loz, while Pete worked on the Lone Wolf multiplayer for example) speaks volumes.  The’ve also partnered with Moon Designs as a publisher, who are in turn distributed by Cubicle 7.  MD have successfully resurrected the fortunes of Glorantha and HeroQuest, making them playable and accessible to new players, without compromising the artistic vision of either, and been able to support books of a very high page count with large amounts of art and stay in business. With C7’s powerful distribution behind them, it means you’ll be seeing MD books in your local gaming shop.  The HQ Gaming license is simple to follow (no standalone games, page references to the rules with a very simple approval process to make sure that nothing obscene like a HQ F.A.T.A.L gets released). I speak from experience here and RQ6 will have a virtually identical license.

So where does this leave OQ? Well I must confess that when I heard Loz n Pete were going to be doing RQ6 I thought “Oh Funk that’s the end of it” and nearly gave up there and then. Then I remembered all the lovely OpenQuest fans, who regularly say nice things about the game and egg me on, how Rik and John have poured their hearts and soul into The Company (Modern OQ) and River of Heaven (Sci-fi OQ), to mention how much fun I’ve had with OQ and quickly realised that quiting was not an option. I’m also very hopeful that supporting OQ financially is a viable option as well, since people say repeatedly they like the simplicity of OQ over the other interactions of D100. OQ sells steadily enough to support itself. In other words OQ has its niche. With The Company & River of Heaven its quite a solid “Fist of Fun” too 🙂

I’ve always held that D100, like D&D, is a shared gaming language and that its worth keeping it alive. 2012 is going to strength the options that D100 players both old and new have and I hope that the community of gamers see this as a positive thing, taking what they like form the various releases to run the most fun game of D100 they can. This is certainly the case in the D&D OSR and I hope this something D100 fans learn quickly rather than descend into arguing the merits of their favoured system. Early signs ,from the various forum discussions that have sprung up around the release of Legend, seems that this is the case 🙂

The Company is Go! GO! GO!!!!

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If you like OpenQuest and want a bit of Modern Warfare in your gaming life, I’ve just put The Company on pre-order until the second week of December.  Same clean D100 system as OQ with added rules for vehicles, guns etc , a plausible yet gamable setting, and two introductory adventures. All in all 200+ pages worth of D100 goodness from us. Like Crypts and Things, if the Goal of the preorder is reached everyone gets the first adventure for FREE!

New OpenQuest review

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Chris Helton over at Dorkland has just posted a review of OpenQuest.

All in all, OpenQuest is a very solid fantasy gaming system that deserves a lot more attention than it receives. In 183 pages it manages to cover the basics of what any group would need out of a game system, and do it in a way that is simple and yet still manages to remain robust. If you are a fan of fantasy games, and do not yet have OpenQuest on your bookshelf (virtual or otherwise) then you need to fix this as soon as you can.

Read the rest

Rest assured its not all been about Crypts and Things here at D101 HQ recently. Some big annoucements regarding OpenQuest coming up very soon 🙂

OpenQuest available in French!

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Some of my fellow countrymen still harbour ill-will to our French , but I’ve always had a soft-spot to our neighbours across the channel. And it turns out that the French have a soft-spot for OpenQuest too, with not one but two games based off the OQ SRD 🙂

OpenQuest french translation coverIf you want a copy of the OpenQuest core rules in French, a team from the Le Scriptorum have made your wish come true!

My thanks go out to the following people involved:
Translation : Arasmo, Mugen, Kurgan
Layout : Etory

Alamander coverThere’s also Alamander, which is a complete game with gorgeous art and layout based of OQ with bits of GORE and MRQ1 added.

You’re going to the worst place in the world, and you don’t know it yet….

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Back in Feb I wrote a charming little adventure for OpenQuest, called the ‘Road to Hell’. Spurred on by the nastiness that I was creating at the time for Crypts and Things and a huge guilt that I had nothing lined up on the OpenQuest front, I sat down and hammered RtH out.

Currently its a 10 page adventure, a small viscous thing that is designed as a Dark Fantasy adventure, to showcase the Major Mental Damage rules and how to do horror in D100 fantasy. Quite simply play starts with the group on a road to nowhere in the middle of an idyllic countryside, something is spotted off the roadside and they find themselves literally sucked into a small Hell, inspired by the stomach churning blood soaked horror of Clive Barker. Also a classic RQ monster has found its home there and to it is literally Heaven. Oh and I managed to get a reference in to one of my favourite bands, Killing Joke, so all is good on the pop-culture reference stakes too 😉

In playtesting with my home group a couple of weekends ago, the 4 hour game racked up one heart attack, one near death mauling and one death, but for the grace of spending a Hero Point (so for all you hard-core D100 players who refuse to use Hero Points, that would be new character being rolled in your game 😉 ). They beat the scenario eventually, by bringing the ‘gruesome’ and by being even more devious and depraved than the evil inhabitants of the hell, but it was a challenge even for their twisted little minds. One of my player’s Guy said that a group that played it ‘straight’ would get mauled, and I have to agree. While I’m not a fan or creator of Killer Dungeons, I like my adventures to be challenging and push the players. This adventure with its simple premise and twist, hits that for me. Oh and I gave them veteran level characters, best skills 85-100 and 9 pts Magic, and it was still tough 🙂

I’m running it again at Furnace Convention in a couple of weeks time. Art has already been commissioned, so some time before Xmas it will get pdf release.